Croquet 2 Play

I agree with Peter Fisk’s idea

… that Croquet (like Smalltalk did before it) is showing us the future of human-computer interaction

but when he says

I don’t think that hundreds of millions of people are going to install Squeak on their computers.

I think he’s not factoring in that Croquet is a Smalltalk evolved meme whose influence isn’t measured in market-share but in mind-share. Peter actually demonstrates this meme factor in describing his project

Vista Smalltalk is an attempt to create an environment like Croquet using only widely deployed software components.

Croquet doesn’t need to become the dominant platform to be very successful but it would be good to have the ideas better realized this time around. I’d seen Peter’s Vista Smalltalk project early on and found it intriguing but didn’t follow it closely because it was Windows only. However, Peter has since noted that Microsoft is losing it’s way and more significantly, he’s ported Vista Smalltalk to Apollo and Flash so now it can run anywhere Flash 9 is supported. He’s got my attention now! While I don’t quite see Apollo as the future of application development, I do think it is an important evolutionary path and Vista Smalltalk may prove to be a powerful meme carrier.

In a chapter on Symbiogenesis, George Dyson chronicles the evolutionary history of cyberspace going from order codes to subroutines and languages executing in operating systems and across networks:

The introduction of distributed object-oriented programming languages … is enabling numerical symbioorganisms to roam, reproduce, and execute freely across the computational universe as a whole. … Nils Barricelli, in 1985, drew a parallel between higher level object-oriented languages and the metalanguages used in cellular communication, but he put the analogy another way: “if humans, instead of transmitting to each other reprints and complicated explanations, developed the habit of transmitting computer programs allowing a computer-directed factory to construct the machine needed for a particular purpose, that would be the closest analogue to the communication methods among cells of various species”

“… In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines. …”

Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence

Given that this evolutionary process is inevitable, I hope we choose not to allow the machines to use us and realize that the machine is us in which case I’m sure it’s running a very advanced, future version of Croquet